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MARYCLAIRE WELLINGER Poet & Painter
Poem-Paintings.
The poem-paintings on this page were originally conceived as word-poems; they were written as such and "finished". Often, my poems would derive from a vivid dream, sometimes in color, or a waking vision. And then when I would write the poem; I was content to "paint with words" my visions for many years.
Later, when I had discovered I was also a visual artist, and developed my skills, I returned to some of my earlier poems and was able to paint or create digitally the original dream or vision that powered my word-poem. "To the Child Locked Up Inside," was first a "concrete" poem, arranging the words in such a way on the white space of the page, that the structure of the print also gave significant meaning to the poem.
Memory, the Root of a Lily
by Maryclaire Wellinger
Memory illuminates our sleep
gliding near silence
through salt marsh down the long river.
Memory swims through water like a boat
a shark of cedar her white beaminess
bearing down upon weathered bronze currents
as moist grass clutches her white hull
bending back the blades
into bands of flat broken silver
humming near silence
as she passes under the white moon,
whose maternal station is kept
there,
beyond the tip of the pine tree's black spine,
the white moon the muskrat's lodestone on purple nights . . .
The muskrat slides out
from the lower chamber of his mud mound
beneath the river at Humarock.
He paddles up for air
peering at water surface level through sharp grass
which pokes like spent rigging above his head.
And we are Memory's weary deck apes,
reaching near silence
under her sail.
We feel the muskrat floating by us,
thumping softly like a wooden blossom
under her bow, keel , and transom.
As the muskrat springs free
below her stern, we too are brushed
by the bow of memory,
as strong as cedar-on-oak.
For us, memory is as luscious
as the root of a lily
the muskrat consumed
contentedly tonight,
and as nourishing. 
In Dreams I Marry Moses Woodfin 1993
by Maryclaire Wellinger
In Dreams I Marry Moses Woodfin
by Maryclaire Wellinger
My blue house in buried hull-in-earth
into Fiske Hill like a wooden boat,
plank-layered-on-plank, clinker-style.
Built by the compass to follow
the arc of the sun,
it nests on a cradle of cut granite stone.
Like a small sea-bird
it rides the ocean of seasons
surfing off the wave-crest of Spring
when tulips burst
through soil and beachstones in the garden
to blossom yellow-and-red like starfish
then it slides down the blind trough of winter.
When I am depressed, even the known horizon line
disappears. It catches and lifts me
in a net of ceiling-beams.
Her windows clear and curious
take me outside
and through her open door
I go into the hill.
In dreams I marry Moses Woodfin
a fisherman who lived here.
His daily catch of cod smells worse
than the garlic and tobacco
on his breath.
He sings the songs of whales in French,
shows me how to make
vinegar from wine
with his hands circling in spirals,
until we lie down together, laughing.
When it rains I live above a river.
Water streams from the hill
down the surface of bare rock ledge
underneath my house where Moses floats
on a pallet of musky air.
I slip down between the floorboards
to embrace him,
muscle upon sigh, laughter upon bone.
"In Dreams I Marry Moses Woodfin" 1993
was published in "BOOGLIT," a New York literary journal,
the Kerouac Memorial Iissue,October, 1999 with distinguished contributors including poet Robert Creeley and Kerouac's biographer, Douglas Brinkley .
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